We’re number one! In 2013, Americans consumed 321 million cases of wine—up 15% from 2005, according to research firm Impact Databank. That solidified our status as the world’s top wine-drinking nation in terms of volume, though we rank only 12th in consumption per person among major wine-drinking countries, far behind top-ranked France. Wine sales in the U.S., meanwhile, grew from $34.5 billion in 2005 to $43.9 billion last year.

Our growing thirst for vino is fueling a boom in U.S. winemaking: The number of wineries in the U.S. jumped more than 80% in the past decade, to around 8,000, according to WineAmerica, the trade group for American wineries. Many of these wine startups are small, boutique wineries, aiming at the premium end of the market with bottles priced at $20 or more.

But research suggests that most of us needn’t buy premium to indulge our love of wine. In blind taste tests, consumers—when they weren’t aware ahead of time of the price of a wine—slightly preferred cheaper wines, according to one of the most comprehensive studies on the topic, published in the Journal of Wine Economics in 2008. “The correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly less,” wrote the authors, who analyzed the results of more than 6,000 tastings.

What’s more, we can’t tell whether a wine is expensive unless we actually see the price tag, research by psychologist Richard Wiseman suggests. In 2011, Wiseman gave 578 people blind tastes tests of wines at a variety of price points, and found that people identified the more expensive white only 53% of the time and the more expensive red only 47% of the time—essentially the same results you’d get from flipping a coin.

To be sure, more experienced drinkers do often prefer more expensive wines because they are trained to taste the complexity, balance, typicity (how typical it is of the grape and the region the grape was grown in) and intensity of the wine, says Jörn Kleinhans, the owner of the Wine Elite Sommelier Company. But, he adds, “For most consumers, it is hard to justify spending a large amount of money on wine.”

Unlike many other food and drink producers, wineries aren’t required to list most of the ingredients that go into their product. That means additives tend to go unnoticed by consumers, says John La Puma, a winemaker, physician and author of “ChefMD’s Big Book of Culinary Medicine.” Perhaps that’s just as well, since fish bladders, clay and crustacean skeletons are among the additives that might otherwise have to be disclosed on the label.

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White, red or rosé?

Many winemakers use sulfites, sugars, oak powders and other additives to help flavor and preserve their wines. But some of the most surprising additives are “fining” agents, which make wine look clearer. Added to wine before it goes into the bottle, they produce a fine layer of solid particles which can be removed from the beverage before it’s shipped to consumers. Dried fish air bladders, known as isinglass, are one fining agent, as is chitosan, which is made up of the exoskeletons of crustaceans like crab and shrimp. Clay, charcoal, egg whites and gelatin are others, says sommelier Jessica Festa, the editor of online magazine Epicure & Culture.

The fining agents serve a useful purpose, of course. But La Puma and others say that it’s possible some of them could be left behind in wine in large enough quantities to trigger allergic reactions. What’s more, ingredients like isinglass or chitosan, which are made from animal parts, can make wine-drinking problematic for those with dietary restrictions.

The wine industry disagrees on the extent to which fining agents make it into the bottle. Michael Kaiser, the director of public affairs for WineAmerica, says that there is no trace of fining agents like fish bladders and crustacean skeletons in the finished product. But in a 2011 paper, the European Food Safety Authority said that fining agents can trigger adverse reactions in wine drinkers in some circumstances.

3. Our experts aren’t always so sharp

Many consumers feel utterly lost when they enter a wine store: With so much to choose from, how will they know what’s good and what’s not? Many times, they rely on a rating from a wine critic—on most scales, wines rated above 90 are outstanding to excellent; those in the 80s, good to very good.

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In one study, individual judges gave wildly divergent scores to different glasses of wine from the very same bottle.

But are those “expert” ratings really meaningful? A study published in the Journal of Wine Economics found that experts weren’t very consistent in their ratings of wine. Over a four-year period, study author Robert Hodgson served wine flights to dozens of judges at the California State Fair Wine Competition, with some of the wines served to the judges three separate times during a given flight, each of those times from the same bottle. The judges then rated the wines on a scale of 80—100 points. Only 10% of the judges were able to score the triplicate samples within a range of 2 points, and 10% weren’t able to score the wines within a range of 16 points. In other words: The very same wine could be rated excellent one round and merely good the next—by the same judge.

Other studies show that experts are easily influenced by factors that shouldn’t matter when judging the flavor of a wine, such as the wine’s price or region.

4. Our business is a money pit

Opening a winery is many a disgruntled worker’s dream, and scrappy startups abound. In the U.S., more than three in four wineries are considered small, making 5,000 cases a year or less, according to data from WineAmerica. But it’s tough to turn a profit in the winemaking business. Andy Brennan, an analyst for IBISWorld, estimates that only about half of wineries in the U.S. turn a profit. (WineAmerica’s Kaiser says it is “basically correct” that wineries, particularly new ones, find it hard to turn a profit.)

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A vineyard worker harvesting grapes at Tres Sabores Winery in St. Helena, California.

Furthermore, profits among those wineries that do reap them have been steady falling: According to a recent report from Silicon Valley Bank, the collective pretax profit for West Coast wineries was 12.6% in 2005; in 2013, it was just 5.4%. No wonder some small winemakers MarketWatch spoke to said they do it for the love of winemaking, not for a love of the dollar.

One reason it’s hard to turn a profit is that established brands offer fierce competition, says Laurie Forster, CEO of The Wine Coach. About 30 companies sell 90% of the wine in the U.S. -- and the three largest (E. & J. Gallo, Constellation Brands
STZ, +1.22%
and The Wine Group) sell about half of it. Each has large marketing budgets and sales teams to push its wines.

What’s more, building up a winery takes a significant investment. “There’s a saying in this business: To make a small fortune, it takes a large fortune,” Forster says.

The Northwest Winery Cost-of-Production calculators www.nwwinerycalculators.org, which are affiliated with Washington State University, recently looked at startup costs for small and medium-size wineries in the state (those producing up to 20,000 cases a year). They found that the startup investment costs for a winery range from about $750,000 for a winery producing 2,000 cases of wine a year (a very small batch) to more than $2.3 million for a 10,000-case producer—with average total costs ranging from about $190 per case for the larger wineries to about $375 per case produced for the smaller ones.

Building and land costs made up the largest portion of the total costs (which means that those looking to open up a winery in a pricey spot like the Napa Valley may have to shell out far more). Over a 10-year period, the annual operating costs drop to about $150 a case for a 2,000-case-a-year winery, and over $130 a case for a 10,000-case-a-year winery.

Not only are the investment costs high, it can take years to realize profits. Gerald White, an emeritus professor of applied economics and management at Cornell University, says it could take “at least four years of negative net income” before a winery turns a profit (if it ever does) -- and likely significantly more. He estimates that for a winery marketing only wine produced from its own grapes, it would take a minimum of 11 years to get into a positive-net-income position. (Most wineries don’t do this, instead bottling wines that mix their own grapes with grapes from other growers—or even using other growers’ grapes exclusively.)

5. Quaint grape-stompers? We’re more like factory owners

Many customers think of wineries as “places with rolling hills of vines and a crew of people bending over picking the grapes and a winemaker painstakingly hovering over tanks and barrels,” says Andrew Stover, sommelier and founder of wine brand Vino 50 Selections. In fact, Stover says, steel machinery, factory-like precision and massive silos are more common—particularly in the making of inexpensive mass-market wines by large companies.

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Aging vats at the McManis Family Vineyards in Ripon, Calif.

Grape-picking is now often done by machines, rather than humans, says Virginie Saverys, the owner of organic wine producer Avignonesi; once the grapes are harvested, they might be run through yet another machine, an “optical sorter,” that picks out the best grapes.

The aging and flavoring process is also often different than consumers imagine. Wines with oak flavors, like many Chardonnays, aren’t always aged in oak barrels. “Real oak is expensive,” Stover notes. “Some winemakers take a shortcut and use mesh bags full of oak chips or wooden staves,” he says, or else use essence of oak, an oil, to flavor the wine. (WineAmerica’s Kaiser notes that “the majority of wineries in the United States use oak barrels to age a lot of their wines.”)

To be sure, all this mechanization has an upside for consumers: It can help keep the price down. “We all want affordable wine, but it’s often not possible that a $10 bottle was handcrafted in that dreamy way,” Saverys says.

6. That deep red isn’t our natural color.

The elegant, burgundy color of your red wine might be a bit inauthentic. Some winemakers use an additive called Mega Purple to enhance the color of their red wine, says Forster. Mega Purple—made by wine behemoth Constellation Brands, owner of labels like Robert Mondavi and Ravenswood—is a thick concentrate of the Rubired grape, a varietal often associated with grape juice. Just a few drops can transform the color of pinkish or light red wine into a much deeper red. Stover says it’s often used as a colorant in inexpensive, “not-so-great” wines, though high-end winemakers occasionally use it as well.

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To look red in your wine glass, they may need some help.

There isn’t reliable data on how many wines contain Mega Purple; Constellation Brands declined to provide data on how much they sell. And since winemakers don’t have to list most additives on the label, consumers most likely won’t know if a given bottle contains it. The winemakers have plenty of reason to use Mega Purple: consumers think that a richer color connotes higher quality, Stover says, and the concentrate can add a touch of sweetness as well. The good news for consumers: It can’t hurt you.

7. You’re paying too much for wine in restaurants

Most consumers know that restaurant wines are particularly pricey, but they may not realize just how much they’re overpaying. Restaurants typically charge consumers anywhere from two to five times as much as the wholesale cost of the bottle—significantly more, on average, than a wine store would. In large, pricey cities like New York and Washington, D.C., the markup might be higher than in other cities, says WineAmerica’s Kaiser.

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Drink up! And pay up.

The markup on by-the-glass prices is often even higher than the bottle markup—and prices are going up. This year, the average glass of wine in a restaurant cost $10.77, up 2.6% from a year earlier, according to data from GuestMetrics; restaurant food prices, meanwhile, were up 2.3%. Those rising prices are thanks, in part, to consumers buying pricier Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir and red blends by the glass, says Bill Pecoriello, CEO of GuestMetrics. Restaurants may also be raising prices as the economy improves and consumers seem willing to spend more.

For most restaurants, the profit margins on wine and other drinks are much higher than the margins on the food they sell. Annika Stensson, the senior manager of research for the National Restaurant Association, says that higher wine prices essentially cover restaurants’ other costs. “Restaurateurs have to take into account the cost of all other operational expenses like labor, training, supplies, kitchen equipment, table- and stemware, marketing, utilities, rent or mortgage to be able to maintain the already slim profit margins on which most restaurants operate,” she says. Stensson also points out that some localities tax alcohol sales in restaurants.

8. Investing in wine is risky business

More than one in 10 high net worth households collect fine wine, and roughly half of them saw those wines as an investment, according to U.S. Trust’s Insights on Wealth & Worth study. And at first glance, wine may seem like a decent bet. Net of insurance and storage costs, wine had annualized real returns of 4.1% from 1900 to 2012, according to a 2013 study published in the Journal of Wine Economics, which looked at auction and dealer prices of wines from five established Bordeaux winemaking houses. That’s better than the returns from art, government bonds and stamps, though stocks outperformed wine.

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A case of Chateau Mouton Rothschild from 1982—a vineyard and vintage popular with wine investors.

Still, wine can be a risky business. Wine returns are inconsistent: In the first quarter of the 20th century, wine prices barely outpaced inflation; prices jumped during World War II and stagnated after it. Plus, wine isn’t as liquid (no pun intended) as some other investment classes, in the sense that you can’t always easily find a buyer when you want one; it’s hard to price, and the market is prone to bubbles, says Kleinhans, the sommelier.

Scan any health website these days and you’re likely to find at least one article touting the health benefits of wine, among them heart health and longevity—all the more so since the recent discovery of the antioxidant resveratrol in red wine. But some studies suggest there are more risks to wine consumption—or at least fewer rewards—than recent headlines might suggest.

For a study published this year in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, researchers tracked 79,000 adults over 12 years; they concluded that even moderate intake of wine (just one to three drinks a day) could increase the risk of atrial fibrillation, a heart arrhythmia that boosts stroke risk; the risk of AF increased 8% with each additional alcoholic drink a day. (The link between AF risk and moderate drinking was strong among wine and strong spirits drinkers, but not among beer drinkers.) A study published in the Australian Dental Journal found that white wine erodes tooth enamel, which can lead to decay.

There’s also the issue of what constitutes moderation for wine-drinkers. Many people think they’re drinking just a glass or two a day, but they may be drinking more than they realize because of the size of their glass, explains Dr. La Puma. One glass, in the medical size-of-serving sense, should be five ounces, he says, but the average wine glass holds between eight and 12 ounces.

10. Climate change may ruin us

Wine grapes are particularly susceptible to small changes in temperature, sunshine and rainfall, which means that climate change may be particularly deleterious to winemakers. Indeed, a number of studies show that fluctuating temperatures may rob some wine-growing areas of their ability to grow quality grapes.

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Next stop: Greenland?

A study published last year in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that, thanks to climate change, up to 73% of the area in Australia currently used for viticulture could become unsuitable for that purpose suitable by 2050, and that other top wine regions, like those in France and California, face similar issues. And a study in the journal Climatic Change found that not only did most of the world’s best wine-producing regions see temperature increases during their growing season from 1950-1999, but that these warming trends over the next 50 years would likely make wine production in those areas “progressively more difficult.”

Both studies pointed out that viticulture may become more tenable in areas that aren’t currently known for their wine production. “Redistribution in wine production may occur within continents, moving from declining traditional wine-growing regions to areas of novel suitability, as well as from the Southern Hemisphere to large newly suitable areas in the Northern Hemisphere,” the authors of the 2013 study write. Perhaps, someday, your grandchildren will toast you with a nice glass of Siberian Malbec.

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